The abyss winking back at me

 

An exasperating morning. It has always amazed me that certain people love so to waste others’ time. Especialy drunks who would like somebody to wave a magic wand and make them sober, no effort required.

Sample phone conversation:

Garrulous drunk: Smashed the car up again coming home last night and can’t remember what happened.  I’d so love to have a few years of sobriety under my belt. How do you do it?

Mary: Go to an AA meeting, you live in Johannesburg and there are meetings all over the place. I can give you numbers to call and somebody will talk to you and organise a lift there.

Garrulous drunk: Oh I am not much of a meeting person, I meant how do you talk yourself out of  drinking?

Mary: I can’t talk myself out of drinking. Go to a meeting.

Garrulous drunk: Meetings are not for me, I’m not like most drinkers and I despise alcoholics. They lack will power. I’d like to just have a few years  without any drinking at all and  you seem to have got there all on your own.

Mary: I didn’t get sober all on my own. Go to a meeting.

But of course he doesn’t want to get sober yet. A few more car smashes might change his mind, or it might not. Right now he is wasting  everybody’s time, including his own.

In my kitchen there are three crates of ripe tomatoes about to be turned into organic passata. I am desperate to get into the kitchen and stir pots of simmering tomato pulp and heat clean  Consol jars in the oven, boil rubber sealing rings, etc. But my housemate and a farmer’s wife are busy in there and I have been instructed to get on with my writing. Later I will be allowed to taste the end result and perhaps make up some dense tomato puree wiith basil and garlic prior to bottling. I feel exiled from foodie paradise.

Last night my elderly landlord came around to visit. He is a conniving and duplicitous character  whom I do not trust and he has cheated me  out of a great deal in terms of finance and property. When I was newly sober, I blamed myself for this, but I  now see the pattern and how many unsuspecting  villagers get hooked into his scams. All the same, he is 82 years old and my dogs  love him so I sit quiet and  say nothing. He pats the dogs and  chats to me  as if nothing has gone wrong between us. By the time he left, my  shoulders were bunched up in knots and I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I trusted him  once and failed to protect myself. So I went out into the garden and picked hydrangeas, ignoring the rant in my head. Then I had a hot bath and went off to bed with a novel by Nancy Huston called Fault Lines. Tossed and turned after switching off the light but fell asleep eventually. Felt a little better this morning. No dramas, no  recriminatory confrontations that would do no good, no revenge fantasies, no self-flagellation, no bitter resentful brooding, no drinking. Uncomfortable feelings  never killed anyone and without alcohol to exacerbate the raw emotions, they pass. In the old drunken days I would stay up raging and plotting and find myself staring into the abyss at 4am, sleepless, crazy and  engulfed by the void. These days the  abyss winks back at me.

Amy Bloom has written a new book entitled Where the God of Love Hangs Out, which strikes me as a metaphor for my own  bitter-sweet, unsatisfactory but improving life. And since I am not allowed to go into the kitchen in a big blue-and-white striped apron and help with the bottling of tomatoes, I shall take a break to look again at Virgilio Ferreira’s  images of Uncanny  Places and muse on all the watery enchanted glimpses of  my own myopic reality that  appear to me  with each  day of sober delights.